You win some and you lose some. What I lost last night at the City Council meeting was any hope that our elected officials actually listen to the delegates.If they did actually listen, they would have heard empirical evidence that the benefits to the city that Jenny Coco's development were offering may not live up to the promises. Councilor after councilor turned on their microphones and pledged their undying devotion to this "Good Corporate Citizen" whose project they must support. Coco development did provide a ton of green space (their Ambassador golf course!) to the area. Funny, they didn't mention the biggest chunk of rotting real estate in the downtown (156 Ouellette, right next to Shanfield's) is owned by this corporation, and is easily one of the most derelict buildings in the core. Their M.O.? Hollow out the core, making the fringes (and their vast holdings of land) seem attractive.
Our councilors raved about these 1,500 jobs the development would provide. Funny, Josh and I found mountains of evidence pointing to the fact that big box retail normally costs a community jobs – not provides them. Who do they think would work there anyways? Windsor residents? No - the bulk of the jobs would go to LaSalle residents. But that's what Windsor does – provides bedroom communities employment, and then they take their paycheques home to their suburban tax havens. They can't hope for anything larger than minimum wage anyways.
Thank goodness for Fulvio Valentinis, who gave everyone watching in TV-Land a planning lesson in urban sprawl. Apparently, all those experts and academics around the globe are wrong – this type of development DOESN'T increase urban sprawl. I'm going to call James Howard Kunstler right now and let him know all his work to date is incorrect and he should go back to writing fiction.
Councilor Lewenza – municipalities CAN combat sprawl. Tell that to Guelph and Vancouver, who have successfully held back attempts at monotonizing their local economy. Tell that to Business Week magazine who warned their readers that mega-retailers may not be all they're cracked up to be. And tell that to PriceWaterhouseCoopers who called big box retail "risky propositions. These are not hippy-dippy capitalist-hating commies we're citing here. These are business people who have seen through the false promise of big box development.
One by one, they praised Coco and ignored the warnings. Even going so far as praising a "highly regarded" local environmentalist who endorsed this project (thanks Postma, for proving that you didn't hear a word the other highly regarded environmentalists were saying) It was an evening that leaves you with the idea that this municipal boat doesn't have anyone at the rudder.
Once again, the lone voice of reason at the meeting last night was Councilor Halberstadt, who warned the rest of council that if we continue down this road we would have more empty big-boxes littering the landscape, more traffic congestion and more closing local businesses in favour of minimum wage employment. He agreed that we must study this topic further, but unfortunately, the rest of council seemed quite content with the status quo. Thank you, Alan, for at least making the attempt.
I am not looking at this exercise as a failure. Sure, we didn't get what we wanted, but did we ever elevate the dialogue. My coworkers were discussing the perils of big box this morning when I arrived at work. They never discuss anything besides cars and sports – so this is a huge development. Guaranteed, items like this will be on the councils agenda again in the future, and when that time comes, they cannot feign ignorance. They are going to be hearing a lot about this decision in the future.
Interested in reading some of our supporting documents? In our presentation and council package, we asked council to defer the decision until a comprehensive Economic Impact Study could be conducted to determine the effect more big box retail mega-centres would have on this community. Here's pretty much everything supplied to our councillors last night, including two examples of what an impact study discovered for other communities.
